The challenge of investigative journalism in the Western Balkans

In the Western Balkans, even the most fundamental and comparatively minute probing into the workings of government can provoke an aggressive response from the very top, as Milka Tadić-Mijović found out.

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“No, no, I only won the libel case in
Serbia. It’ll be a long time before I win in Montenegro,” Milka Tadić-Mijović
tells me with a subtle scoff at the speed at which legal processes unfold in
the Balkans.

Tadić-Mijović, who has served in leading
editorial positions at local outlets and has written for international ones, is
one of Montenegro’s most prominent journalists. She is a top expert on media
rights in southeastern Europe, an investigative reporting lecturer and trainer,
and was named in Reporters without Borders’ first-ever list of “100 Information
Heroes.”

In 2013 she wrote an article that had
analyzed a Podgorica conference on media, with particular focus on the fact
that liberal Montenegrin outlets Vijesti and Monitor
were not welcome and only journalists close to the Đukanović ruling
establishment were allowed to be in the room.

Following this, the Belgrade-based portal
e-Novine published an extensive rebuttal piece,
fundamentally questioning Tadić-Mijović’s credibility to speak on the matter,
while evoking sexist and probing personal overtones.

Milka Tadić-Mijović. Photo supplied by author.

She claims the piece was
written in the most traditional form of character assassination based on
tendentiously researched and presented information regarding not only her professional
but private life.

Vying to clear her name, she filed a
defamation lawsuit with the High Court in Belgrade. She won the case this past
July, with the court ordering e-Novine to pay her €8,000
in damages for tarnishing her “honour and reputation” by publishing false and
insulting information. In Montenegro, she still awaits outcomes on several
cases before local courts that she filed against the formerly state-owned
outlet Pobjeda.

This leads to a very interesting
discrepancy in the way the legality of public lawsuits work in Serbia and
Montenegro. “This was largely possible because the judiciary in Serbia still,
to a certain extent, operates independently of the ruling party,” Tadić-Mijović
says. “In Montenegro, these two couldn’t be closer together.”

Serbia has perhaps the highest proportion
of legal actions following media publications in the region, partly because any
ruling government in the country has had a long tradition of frantically and,
often, fatally
silencing any oppositional voices. These legal actions come from both sides
of the coin, institutional and public, and although they do provide an insight
into the heightened sensitivity of political or corporate actors to free
discourse, they also point to the welcome use of courts to settle disputes
rather than actual vendettas.

The sensibilities of readers in the Balkans are such that there isn’t yet a cognizance, and therefore trust, of independent media

In a region with one of the highest
proportions of partisan journalism and media-political cronyism in Europe, I
ask her whether organizations such as hers, the Montenegro Center for
Investigative Journalism and the weekly Monitor, can contribute to
a greater degree of information transparency.

“That’s something that’s very difficult
to measure at the moment, and partly because we’re just starting out,” she
says. “But also because the sensibilities of readers in the Balkans are such
that there isn’t yet a cognizance, and therefore trust, of independent media.”

Tadić-Mijović also attributes this to a
structural problem within media itself. “I think, what is happening in the
Balkans, is we’ve lost readers as the primary financers of media, and are
instead witnessing a complete centralization of journalism,” she points out.
“This allows for more complete control over most mainstream outlets.”

Thin-skinned politicians

To further underline the extent to which
watchdogs, NGOs and independent media are impeded in Serbia, even the most
fundamental and comparatively minute probing into the workings of government
can provoke the
most exaggerated response from the very top.

In 2014 Dunja Mijatović, Representative
on Media Freedom for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
(OSCE), pointed towards the blocking of Internet sites in Serbia at crucial
times. One of these instances was an alleged government-ordered temporary
shutdown of a publication that ran a story on a high-ranking minster who had
forged his Ph.D. dissertation.

Mijatović issued a statement that these
kinds of interventions were becoming commonplace within the current
administration. Serbian Prime Minister Vučić was swift and unapologetic in his
lengthy and threatening response to Mijatovic, claiming that she had
“[launched] a most dirty campaign against him and his…campaigning for freedom
and rule of law.”

And although Serbia’s media freedom index
has categorically improved since the Milošević regime, citizen advocate Saša
Janković maintains that there exists in Serbia an “extraordinarily difficult
situation for freedom of expression because of a chain of recent events that,
although not on their own dangerous, all in all reflect a concentrated effort
to silence all opposition.”

Growing Pains

However, Tadić-Mijović’s legal run-ins
also provide a different insight into the liberal-independent media, one of
immaturity and impetuousness – and of impassioned verbal critiques, even if the
authors or journalists in question are well-respected and seasoned – as was the
case with the Belgrade publication. Perhaps in the absence of and lack of
prospect for a freer media environment, seasoned journalists are now left to
their own devices of textual takedowns that, more often than not, needlessly
point to details that are unnecessary and detract from the main point.

In spite of all of these challenges, both
Janković and Tadić-Mijović invest their hopes in citizen watchdogs and a civil
society that is informed and dedicated to the transparency of information, on
which the Montenegrin Center for Investigative Journalism continually works.

“We need to prove ourselves in the eyes
of the general public, to strengthen our general image by continuing to report
in the public interest,” Tadić-Mijović says. Because, she explains, they remain
dependent, by and large, on whatever is currently being served to them.

Because by publishing projects such as
the Montenegrin Center’s investigation
of offshore business and the Buying Up Paradise
story the Bosnian Center for Investigative Reporting did in collaboration with
the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, public trust for
independent media can be (re)established not just in the Balkans overall, but
especially in Serbia and Montenegro – countries where the links between state
and public discourse is emphasized tenfold.

And while, in essence, Tadić-Mijović’s
words echo a platitude, they are at the moment perhaps the only truism that
media in Serbia and Montenegro face.

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